HIROMI KAWAKAMI was born in Tokyo in 1958. Her first novel, Kamisama (God), was published in 1994. In 1996, she was awarded the Akutagawa Prize for “Hebi o Fumu” (“A Snake Stepped On”), and in 2001, she won the Tanizaki Prize for her novel Sensei no Kaban (Strange Weather in Tokyo), which became an international bestseller. Strange Weather in Tokyo was short-listed for the 2013 Man Asian Literary Prize and the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Kawakami has contributed to editions of Granta in both the U.K. and Japan and is one of Japan’s most popular contemporary novelists.